The term "pill box" embraces the small boxes in which aspirin tablets, indigestion-correcting tablets, and the like are packaged and sold.
Such a pill box can be easily carried in a pocket or pocketbook. For many years such a pill box has been exemplified by a slim hinged metal box of rectangular shape. It is no longer acceptable because of the 1972 Child Safety Act requiring any product possibly harmful to children to be packaged in an adequately child-resistant manner. The old familiar little hinged metal pill box can be opened too easily by children.
A new pill box is scheduled for commercial production and is planned for use in packaging aspirin tablets under a well-known trademark. This new box is intended to be acceptably child-resistant so as to replace the little hinged metal box which for forty years has been a tradition.
This new box is made with interlocked relatively sliding top and bottom parts, the parts being plastic moldings, the sides of the top part requiring finger squeezing to bow the top sufficiently for unlocking. Its construction is described by the Horvath U.S Pat. No. 3,888,350, June 10, 1975, which gives examples of suitable plastics as well as dimensions of the box.
This patented pill box is not moisture-proof, this term being used in the sense that the box does not protect pills against atmospheric moisture, keeping in mind that many pills have the characteristic of either sticking together or disintegrating when subjected to moisture.
The Horvath U.S Pat. No. 3,987,891, Oct. 26, 1976, discloses a child-resistant pill box which is intended also to be moisture-proof. For moisture protection intersliding rigid plastic surfaces are used which apparently are inadequate to provide effectively the desired moisture-proofness. This box, like the box of the earlier Horvath patent, is formed by rectangular rigid plastic top and bottom parts which interslide.
Such new forms of pill boxes have the advantage that the bottom or container parts can travel along on a conveyor with the top part or cover completely removed, permitting the boxes to be rapidly loaded in succession with the pills, the top part then being pressed down and snapped on the bottom part of each traveling box. This is a pill packaging advantage over the old metal box from which the hinged cover or lid cannot be removed during pill loading operations.
The object of the present invention is to improve on the pill boxes of these Horvath patents with the object of providing a box having their advantages but which is in addition even more child-resistant and which is moisture-proof to a degree assuring that the boxed pills can be kept in their originally manufactured condition when the box is exposed to atmospheric moisture.